Ghalta, and GTA

Janosik

@TheHunter said:
ATV is an event that actively encourages and benefits GTA, as if it needed a leg up.

It's really time to talk about nerfing Ghalta, I think. The latest card which people are breaking with GTA (Ghalta, Tortoise, Atraxa for any devs listening who might be unaware of the terminology) is Annie Joins Up, and while Ghalta exists in it's present form cards like that are just going to keep coming.

I might make a separate thread about Ghalta today, actually...

And here, indeed, is that thread!

Sitting snuggly at the top of the top tier of Standard decks for some time now is a deck known colloquially as GTA, for it's habit of playing Ghalta, Stampede Tyrant, Blossoming Tortoise, and Atraxa, Grand Unifier. (Sometimes I play a mono green version without Atraxa for the sake of journal quests... it's still incredibly broken)

I don't think that there's any other deck in Standard that has anything like the explosive power of GTA in Greg's hands. I know of at least one silly combo deck that can win extremely fast (tagging @Xibvert ^_^), and there are very dangerous mono PWs whose passive abilities make them very formidable (Liliana of the Veil and Teferi, Chronoclast are both feared by players!), but none of these is going to put pressure on you as early in the game as GTA can... Greg's certainly not going to play the cards in that combo deck in the right order.

As early as turn 1, and certainly comfortably by turn 3, Greg can play his entire hand, and probably far more cards than that, putting multiple large threats on the board (perhaps even lethal in one attack!), AND fill up his loyalty (Both Wrenn and Realmbreaker and Sarkhan, Unbroken have 3rd Planeswalker abilities which break this deck even further).

Killing all creatures with, say, a Push/Pull or No Witnesses still leaves Greg way ahead, with his extra loyalty, cards in hand full of mana waiting to counter your plays, and any supports he may have played on the board (Villainous Wealth and Demolition Field are 2 particularly insidious ones!). Even a total board sweep effect like The Great Aurora or Urgent Necropsy (if you somehow managed to get 2 Simple tokens amidst all the chaos) will still only solve 1 out of 3 of those additional problems.

GTA decks are becoming more and more common in weekday events. I mean, if you're just playing the daily events to collect the resources, who wouldn't want to clear those events in the fastest time possible by using the most broken deck? In coalition events, it's more difficult to play GTA, because it's extreme power means it's very easy to win before you can complete both objectives. This, however, does not stop some players playing the deck. It can be very frustrating for players who are building decks to achieve the objectives to face/off against a deck much more broken than theirs who are not.

Webcore seem to want to keep the power level of at least a few new cards very high with each new set, and that's fun for us, the players, but it does mean that each new set is likely to produce a new toy for Ghalta to break. The latest one in OTJ is Annie Joins Up, and here's our @mainloop demonstrating it's power:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3X7eWDW0eNc

Greg, of course, is not the best at playing his combo cards in the right order to go infinite, but I've already seen for myself a GTA deck with Annie Joins Up in Training Grounds which played one card from it's hand and the resulting turn left creatures large enough to kill me in a single turn on the battlefield after the in-game loop timer (LPS) timed out.

Ghalta's 'high' 25 mana cost is much less of a drawback than you'd think. While it's unlikely that Greg will cascade into a Ghalta on turn 1, it's certainly possible, and by turn 3 it's pretty likely that Greg will have the mana to cast it. And, of course, there are ways to cheat Ghalta into play for less mana, most notably Blossoming Tortoise and Thunderous Debut. In the hands of a player, it's not hard to get 25 mana in 2 swaps; my man @Larz70 recently told me that with a specific PW with fairly average mana bonuses (Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God), you get an average of 15 mana on your turn for a swap. I thought this sounded crazy high but I tested it myself and stap me if it isn't absolutely true.

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So... I think, personally, that something in GTA needs a nerf, and I think it's Ghalta.

Atraxa is of course extremely powerful, but we had Atraxa before we had Ghalta and she didn't seem to be so much of a problem back then. She could go infinite with Sarkhan, Unbroken's ultimate PW ability, but it was harder to do without Ghalta generating all that loyalty.

Blossoming Tortoise, too, is extremely powerful, and if anyone wanted to say it's one of the best creatures in Standard, I'd probably agree. I'd hope we can get away with not nerfing the Tortoise tho. We have quite a lot of very powerful cards in Standard; like, say, Teferi Hero of Dominaria, or Rakdos Patron of Chaos, or Leyline of the Guildpact... you might describe these cards as 'broken' ('broken' is a word that gets a lot of use when describing MTG cards!), but, dammit, we like playing with powerful cards, and they don't need fixing unless they warp the entire Standard format too much.

So I would hope that GTA can be busted down to a more reasonable power level by just nerfing one card, Ghalta.

I think it's very telling that Oktagon avoided printing green gem conversion cards for years. In the early days of MTGPQ, we'd get one of them in every set or two, like Nissa's Renewal, Season's Past, Hour of Promise, or Rishkar's Expertise, and it wasn't long before everyone figured out that you could throw a bunch of them in a deck with a card draw engine like Baral, Chief of Compliance, Prism Array, or Rashmi, Eternities Crafter,, add in some kind of win condition like Ulvenwald Hydra, Sage of Ancient Lore (which had a significant nerf since it was created!), or Part the Waterveil, and bingo, you'd have a deck which would go infinite. Indeed, it was the creation of decks like these which necessitated in inclusion into the game of the Loop Prevention System (LPS). Such decks still sit firmly in the top tier of decks in the broken combo swamp that is the Legacy format (note to devs: don't try and fix Legacy. That way madness lies). When Webcore took over as developers, it didn't take them long to give us both Ghalta and Tempt with Discovery, and who knows if they'll continue to print top tier conversion cards in the future. With a critical mass of such cards, Standard might just become Legacy 2.0

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How would I nerf Ghalta? Well that's a tricky one innit. You don't want a nerf that makes it too weak, you don't want a nerf that doesn't reduce it's power level enough to stop it being a problem, and you ideally don't want to keep nerfing it multiple times until you get it right. Thank goodness this isn't my job! ^_^

Is creating cards like Desert a good answer to Ghalta's power? I don't think it is. Desert, in particular, is too broad an answer: it punishes fair decks that want to play with, say, the MKM gem conversion lands/supports, or small creatures that gain mana like Ziatora's Envoy or Steamcore Scholar far more than it does the huge 15/15 body and loyalty generating power of Ghalta. All players like gaining mana to cast their cards, and cards that that do so and are resilient to Desert tend to be very high rarity. But narrow answers to deck like GTA are a bad idea too, since, as I've noted before, we don't play any PvP games with a sideboard in MTGPQ they way they do in paper MTG.

My thoughts on the subject would be that reducing Ghalta below a 15/15 doesn't do much, and, honestly, reducing the amount of gems she converts may not be the right nerf either. Perhaps after Ghalta converts gems, she could disable all other cards in hand, or end the turn outright? Does that seem like a decent nerf? Or perhaps, Webcore could take the unprecedented step of banning Ghalta in Standard... she doesn't look out of place in Legacy beside the other gem conversion cards there, and, of course, there are still plenty of opportunities to play Ghalta in Legacy events every single day, most notably with the Trial of the Planes event.

Opperstamper

Is this a good time to remind of this:
https://d3go.com/card-balance-and-more-mtgpq/

If Webcore wants to keep the same philosophy, then yeah, GTA should be addressed. If Webcore has a different design philosophy, then it would be nice to hear their perspective.

ambrosio191

I know it's not really an answer for how powerful Ghalta is, but I want to put out that Worldsoul's Rage can be an option for those that have the card. It's a direct damage spell with flash that increases the amount of damage based on the number of gems Greg converts. It's pretty much an auto-include now against any green deck if I'm running Red/Green. On multiple occasions Greg has gone off with a GTA combo and I was able to kill him on his turn with Worldsoul's Rage.

Keyler

I wish there was a real effort to balance the power level of the cards so that more diversity of decks could be played. Instead of a bunch of normal/bad cards, other good and interesting but not broken cards (and therefore barely playable in such a broken environment) and 4 or 5 very op cards with respect to the others per set, which are the ones that everyone They end up playing. And more formats appart from legacy (which is dead in platinum for several years) and standard (which is getting the same way). At the end lot of times the game becomes in a farming game to get few resources from each event fastly instead of play for having fun.
Probably ghalta converting 7 gems was still good and not broken.

BrSchnitz

Another potential nerf for Ghalta is the often used "this ability may activate only x times per turn," where a good x for Ghalta has yet to be determined. 2? Is 2 good? Maybe twice per turn and drop the number of gems converted? This is where the absence of aggressive play testing is apparent.

Abracadavers

I would like to point out a Legacy card here: Zacama, Primal Calamity. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it broken? I don't think so. Of course since it is in Legacy it is competing with all of the other broken cards there, but I think a big reason you don't see it more is because a conversion from Zacama seldom gives enough mana to power out another Zacama. That isn't the case for Ghalta. So maybe a solution could be to reduce the amount of gems Ghalta converts? It would still be an excellent card, but I think it would be a good start.

I am much more in favor of a nerf that just slightly reduces the power level of cards rather than nerfing it into the ground. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that hates it when cards get nerfed to unusable after they spend resources obtaining it.

Mainloop25

All it needs is to reduce the amount of gems converted. Right now the whiff rate is close to zero; I think that rate needs to be upped.

ArielSira

@Mainloop25 said:
All it needs is to reduce the amount of gems converted. Right now the whiff rate is close to zero; I think that rate needs to be upped.

Change the converted gems down to 10 and I'd be happy. The card will still be powerful enough to play.

I lost one game in HxB due to Tortoise/Ghalta, which started by the opponent playing Tortoise. Because of the matches from Ghalta it was a 20 card 2nd turn. That is ridiculous.

madwren

@Abracadavers said:
I would like to point out a Legacy card here: Zacama, Primal Calamity. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it broken? I don't think so. Of course since it is in Legacy it is competing with all of the other broken cards there, but I think a big reason you don't see it more is because a conversion from Zacama seldom gives enough mana to power out another Zacama. That isn't the case for Ghalta. So maybe a solution could be to reduce the amount of gems Ghalta converts? It would still be an excellent card, but I think it would be a good start.

I agree with the fact that the number of gems converted is significant. That being said, even when Zacama was out, it didn't have something like Tortoise powering it out. We have an instance where two cards operate so synergistically that they create a significant problem.

The moment the player base is given a card that can sprogs other cards into play for free, we will find ways to break it.

Gunmix25

maybe cap out how high of a cost tortoise can bring out? like no higher than 20? likely players will start including Gaea's fuzzy mossman of revenge again. shrug

naabaldan

The great heist will push this topic even further. Gta everywhere. No skill.

Janosik

Something interesting is going on this weekend, isn't it, which I think speaks to Webcore's intentions for the game.

In The Greatest Heist, Greg gets a significant buff in all his games, so clearly Webcore think it's acceptable that some (but, of course, not all!) players occasionally get a game matched against a GTA that's even more powerful than usual.

I, for one, am worried about running into GTA this weekend! There's already quite a difficulty spike in those games.

I'm reminded of the concept, often used in mobile gaming design, of the Skinner Box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
In brief: a psychological trick that you can employ to increase a user's interactions with a system is to make that system's behaviour random rather than predictable.

I wonder if Webcore are more interested in giving us a random experience than a balanced one, or even a fair one. We players might think it unfair if one player beats another in a coalition event simply by luckily avoiding difficult opponents, but maybe that's an intended feature of the current design philosophy.